Woman and Birds in the Night

Women and birds would feature together in a number of artworks by Joan Miro, produced in a relatively short period of time. Each one reduces the figures down to abstract shapes and lines in a particular manner which makes each of these items instantly recognisable as Miro's.

Woman and Birds in the Night appears similar to the graffiti styles which were common in the late 20th century. There are scrawls and scribbles of paint here, seemingly with no attempt to produce forms with which we are familiar. In fact, the artist is working to a plan here, but his abstract, expressive approach will need time to be understood. Curved lines sit at the end of his thick lines, whilst eyes appear elsewhere, with red pupils and black outlines. Miro incorporates slightly more variations in colour here, bringing in green, blue, yellow and red as well as a thick block of black to the bottom left hand corner. There are also the speckles of paint which Miro used sometimes in order to add interest to his backgrounds, but without distracting any viewer too much from the content in the foreground.

During his time focusing on this theme, the artist produced Woman and Birds which was a huge sculpture which still remains in place today. He would also release a large number of painted versions, though Woman and Birds in the Night is a particularly memorable iteration. This piece came about in 1968, with several other related paintings coming from a year earlier, suggesting that Miro was devoted to this topic for a period of several months which perhaps wrapped around the new year. This body of work captures the essence of Miro beautifully and so it an important series to look into for those wanting to really understand this important Catalan painter, ceramicist and draughtsman. Details on the individual elements of this series are a little hard to come across, though, and so many just refer to these paintings as a group instead.

Miro stuck with this content for quite a while, releasing several other interpretations of the basic premise. All of these can instantly be linked together, because of the similarity of style in each one, with other examples including Woman and Bird and Woman and Birds. The artist would create sets of symbols in an informal manner and then replicate them across different artworks, sometimes even pushing into other disciplines altogether. He essentially created a brand which helped his work to stand out, though at that time he was unique enough that few would even be compared to him in any case. He would move around many different art movements within his career, and succeed within most of them, before achieving a style very much of his own later on in life. He had earlier visited contemporary styles such as Cubism and Surrealism, for example, no doubt inspired by some of the colleagues with whom he spent time in his early years.